Heading for the hills in a pandemic
This March will mark three years since my wife, Britt, and I packed up a couple of suitcases, and headed, quite literally, for the hills with dog in tow, to spend what we assumed would be a week or so. This was the beginning of some of the strangest/coolest (most superlatives would work here) months of my adult life, so far.
Britt and I had been searching for a fixer upper in the Catskill mountains since we first started seriously dating, circa 2015. In January of 2020, we finally found something with great potential for the right price. Three years later, recounting the way that all of this went down feels a lot like randomly remembering a very weird dream.
We went under contract almost immediately on the above-mentioned fixer upper. Having completed the inspection and other due diligence, the closing was scheduled for March 20, 2020. Our attorney informed us ahead of time that there was a hiccup with the title process: It turned out that the seller had owned “our” house as well as the adjacent one, which he had sold a little over a year prior. By mistake, the deed and mortgage for the adjacent parcel had both been recorded with this house included in the legal description. Whoops! Our attorney said that it was doubtful that this title company error would be resolved by the target closing date.
Meanwhile, back in the ’boros things were really starting to get crazy. I remember coming into work one day and seeing an image on the news showing about 20 excavators furiously digging away, captioned with a headline claiming something outlandish like, China was trying to build a new 300-bed hospital in a week to deal with some sort of virus outbreak. That same week my employer conducted a “trial” remote work day to make sure that everyone could get onto the network, etc. Very shortly thereafter, my office, along with most of the Midtown office crowd, had started to transition to remote work “until this thing blows through.” It was great for a couple of weeks. Not having to schlep across the East River twice a day was a welcome change. Not to mention, my home office dress code was much less formal than the one in Midtown.
But the novelty wore off fairly quickly. First of all, Britt, who is self-employed, was splitting her work days between our apartment and a local co-working space that closed its doors about a week later. At this point, we, along with most of NYC, did not yet understand the magnitude by which this mysterious virus would change the city.
In the span of a few days, everything was shutting down and things got very tense. Leaving the apartment to go in public was deemed dangerous, potentially deadly. It was scary as hell, to me, at least. Meanwhile, Britt and I (plus the dog, Lola) were now jammed together in a 1000-square foot space, trying to conduct business as usual. This is not a sob-story by any means. In fact, I fully acknowledge that it was an absolute dream – the good kind! – compared to the situations many people were facing. But it was certainly exacerbating my already-elevated level of anxiety caused by the sudden chaotic turn the world had just taken. I was desperate to get out of the city. I think that Britt was as well, if for no other reason than to give our apartment floor a break from my restless pacing. The week that we were supposed to be closing on the Catskills house, we hatched a plan to pack a suitcase and just hang out at the “new” house for a week or so until the virus scare was over.
The day before the scheduled closing, it became very apparent that the title issue was not going to be resolved in time to close the following day. Britt and I brainstormed for a solution. We knew that the house was vacant, so we came up with the idea of asking the seller if we could lease the place until it was possible to close. I called our attorney, who relayed our request to the seller. The seller did us one better, and agreed to let us take possession early as long as we insured the place and switched over the utilities to our name. Done! We papered the agreement with a simple two-pager, then got busy packing the car.
The next morning, we left NYC before 7am. The listing agent had been kind enough to leave the keys in a lockbox for us, so when we arrived at the house that morning we were able to gain entry to the place with zero drama. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, and the place was pretty beat up. But hey, it was nice to be out of the city. Anyway, it was only going to be for a week or so, right?
Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, Jake Breinholt has been an avid outdoorsman and photographer for as long as he can remember. He moved to New York for school in the early aughts. After about 15 years of the desk jockey grind, he and his wife made good on their years-long dream of owning a home in the Catskills. As he’s spent the past few years fixing up the place, he’s also getting back in touch with his roots through time in the great outdoors. Check out his Personal Blog + Photography.
This column first appeared in the HVNY newsletter, This week in the Hudson Valley. Sign-up to get it delivered for free every week.